The face of Jemima Murdoch had only just left the front pages of the national papers. Around a year ago she had complained to an OCU in the north of the city that she was being followed and her life was being threatened. Faced with flimsy evidence, the officers on the case had labelled her a neurotic and refused to take her complaints too seriously. They’d paid the price only a matter of weeks ago, with two fatalities; Murdoch’s stalker, her ex-boyfriend, stabbing to death his prey before cutting his own wrists in the full public glare of a busy local shopping centre. It had made a whole lot of the top brass determined that it wouldn’t happen again.‘Tenner says it’s a duff,’ said Millie. Her apparent flippancy was born of frustration. Since the killing, any reported incidents had to be followed up, and the policy played into the hands of every attention-seeker on the patch. While the number of harassments had risen significantly, the vast majority turned out to be false alarms.‘Any detail on this one?’ Mariner asked, as he and Millie descended to the ground floor.
